In her first interview since taking over the reins of Sentebale, Cathy Ferrier
discloses how Prince Harry makes his presence felt even while he's on the
front line in Afghanistan.

Job interviews surely don’t get much more daunting than the grilling Cathy Ferrier went through before she was appointed as chief executive of the charity Sentebale.

After an initial meeting with the charity’s chairman she was told to present herself at St James’s Palace for a 90-minute audience with its co-founder, Prince Harry, then dashed across London so that Prince Seeiso of Lesotho could run the rule over her.

“It wasn’t your run of the mill day in London,” smiles Ferrier, but then hers is no run of the mill job either.

Since she was chosen to head the charity for African children in March, Ferrier, 52, has become one of Prince Harry’s most important aides.

She rarely goes more than a fortnight without some sort of contact with him, and even his front line deployment in Afghanistan, where he flies Apache attack helicopters, has not prevented him playing a hands-on role.

“He keeps in email contact from Afghanistan,” she explains. “If there are any developments I make sure he is aware of them, so if we need his sign-off or need to make sure he is supportive of something I will contact him. I probably email him in Afghanistan every other week.”

Sentebale is Prince Harry’s personal crusade to improve the lives of children in Lesotho, one of the world’s poorest countries. Many of the children helped by the charity are orphans, a significant number are HIV positive, and others are “herd boys” whose families send them out on their own to look after livestock in remote locations from when they are as young as five.

The Prince, who inherited his mother’s determination to help Africa’s most vulnerable children, set up Sentebale (the local name for the forget-me-not) in 2006 with Prince Seeiso to provide schooling, healthcare and hot meals to children in the mountain kingdom.

The charity got off to a faltering start, to put it mildly, needing an emergency loan from the proceeds of the 2007 Diana, Princess of Wales memorial concert and a donation of £250,000 from the former Tory treasurer Lord Ashcroft to keep it in the black.

But Ferrier insists Sentebale’s problems have been consigned to the past, and, in her first newspaper interview since taking over the charity, discloses ambitious plans for expansion to other African countries.

“We have researched nine other countries in southern Africa which have similar problems to Lesotho, with a high number of orphans and high HIV infection rates, and we have a short-list of four countries,” she said.

“We still have an absolute commitment to doing all we can in Lesotho, but we want to take the programme to other countries because there is huge unmet need.”

Expanding the charity’s work will mean boosting its income from the current levels of around £2m per year to around £8m in four years’ time, a big ask considering that it has taken six years to reach even the modest income it now enjoys.

Ferrier’s CV, however, suggests she will deliver. She has worked in marketing for Walt Disney, Burton and WHSmith and her most recent job was as marketing director of Oxfam, which raises more than £360m per year and has a staff of 5,000. Having been there seven years, she was widely expected to succeed Dame Barbara Stocking as the head of the Oxford-based charity.

Then came the approach from Sentebale, and Ferrier’s switch to a charity that employs just five people in the UK and another 15 in Lesotho, which surprised many in the charity world.

“I could see this charity had a huge potential for growth and I could personally influence that,” she says, sitting in Sentebale’s tiny conference room at its headquarters near St James’s Palace. “It’s tangible, you can get your hands round it and shape it and make a real difference to the people you’re trying to help.”

Meeting Prince Harry convinced her she was making the right move. “It was a good conversation,” she says of her job interview with him. “He is very passionate about making a difference in Lesotho and about the plight of the children there.”

She was also convinced that her predecessor, Kedge Martin, had put the charity on a sound footing under the guidance of its chairman, Philip Green, and that Sentebale had a bright future.

Since she started the job her feet have hardly touched the ground: supervising the charity’s staff in Lesotho has meant trips to Africa every other month; she sits down with Prince Harry to discuss Sentebale’s future plans at least as often, and immediately after our interview she is off to St James’s Palace for one of her regular meetings with the Prince’s Principal Private Secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton.

Having Prince Harry as Patron has obvious benefits when it comes to attracting donors and publicity, though the flipside of that is that if the Prince does anything outlandish the charity finds its Patron splashed over the front pages of newspapers all over the world.

In August Ferrier had the unwelcome experience of seeing Prince Harry naked on the front page of The Sun after he was photographed by one of several girls he had invited back to his hotel room in Las Vegas for a game of strip poker.

Were the pictures a problem for the charity?

“No, it didn’t cause us any problems,” says Ferrier. “People were sympathetic towards him on the whole.”

Despite Harry’s involvement, she says, “a lot of people don’t know where Lesotho is and don’t know the charity.

“We are looking to attract more supporters and donors and we are already getting a lot more interest from foundations.”

Some of the charity’s programmes have been in place long enough that Sentebale is now in a position to approach such major donors as the Elton John Aids Foundation and show them that the charity has proven results.

But Sentebale is hardly a household name, so Ferrier is hoping to achieve a quantum leap in public recognition with a garden at Chelsea Flower Show in 2013.

The idea had been discussed at board level several times before, and Ferrier decided now was the right time to go ahead. B&Q agreed to fund a garden which has been designed by Jinny Blom and features a recurring circular motif, to reflect the circular mud huts that dot the landscape of Lesotho and the circular patterns used in its native art.

“Harry wanted to see the design, he wanted to look at the drawings, he was keen it was Lesotho inspired,” says Ferrier. “He is more keen on the message it gets across, and we have got a brilliant designer so I don’t think Harry would dare take her on!”

The last time the Prince visited Lesotho was in 2010, when he took his brother the Duke of Cambridge to see Sentebale’s work at a remote orphanage in Semongkong.

The Prince can’t wait to get back there, says Ferrier, though she can’t say when his next visit might be. His military duties and foreign tours as a representative of the Queen have to take priority, and he is likely to be asked to represent the Queen on an official tour in the spring.

The last time he was in Lesotho he listed one of his ambitions as: “Live in Africa.” And with plans to expand his charity to five countries, his next trip surely cannot be far away.